Thinkers Timeline

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794) was a French chemist whose systematic use of the balance to measure the weights of substances before and after chemical reactions helped transform chemistry from a largely qualitative study into a quantitative science. He was born in Paris to a wealthy bourgeois family, studied law in accordance with his family's wishes, and then turned to science. He was elected to the Academy of Sciences at twenty-five. To fund his expensive experimental work he became a member of the Ferme generale, the private tax-collecting consortium that gathered certain taxes for the French crown — a position that gave him income and later cost him his life. In 1771 he married Marie-Anne Paulze, fourteen years his junior, who became his essential scientific collaborator, translating English papers into French, drawing apparatus, and keeping laboratory records. Through the 1770s and 1780s Lavoisier carried out meticulous experiments on combustion, calcination, and respiration, eventually showing that combustion was reaction with a component of air he called oxygene. He proposed a new chemical nomenclature and published Traite elementaire de chimie in 1789, widely regarded as the first modern chemistry textbook. In the French Revolution, his membership of the tax farm became a mortal liability. He was arrested, tried, and guillotined in 1794 at fifty, along with twenty-seven other former tax collectors. The mathematician Lagrange remarked the next day: it took them only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not be enough to produce another like it.